The objectives of this contract are the conduct of a series of studies to evaluate the spatiotemporal pattern recognition capabilities of the skin for conveying speech information to deaf, deaf-blind and severely hearing-impaired persons. Phase I shall consist of an evaluation of the effectiveness of the Auditory/Karhunen-Loeve (AKL) representation, a Principal Components Analysis of English speech, in conveying the speech code to the skin and the development of a "real-time" AKL system. Phase II shall include the determination of the optimum configuration of AKL parameters and the development of a breadboard system of the AKL processor.